{"id":10373,"date":"2023-06-06T00:50:08","date_gmt":"2023-06-06T04:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=10373"},"modified":"2023-06-11T19:19:11","modified_gmt":"2023-06-11T23:19:11","slug":"the-political-economy-of-disability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/06\/the-political-economy-of-disability\/","title":{"rendered":"The political economy of disability"},"content":{"rendered":"

H<\/span>uman global society today is in an increasingly precarious, injurious, and repressive state: economic inequality, social stratification, health disparity, climatic injustice, police and governmental violence, and both hot and cold conflicts and wars between rival nation-states. For disabled people in the U.S., the basic conditions of existence have stagnated or worsened over the past several decades.<\/p>\n

Disabled people in the U.S. today experience a poverty rate of approximately 30 percent; comprise 40 percent of the total homeless population; have an active labor market participation rate of less than 20 percent, despite self-reporting a preference to do so at a rate well over 60 percent. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people remain today living in institutional or carceral environments, such as nursing homes or prisons, where conditions tend towards the cruel or barbaric.<\/p>\n

Having been through two years of a viral pandemic, we have seen that COVID fatality rates were at their disproportionate highest precisely within the nation\u2019s prison and nursing home systems.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, millionaire owners of private for-profit nursing homes have been largely immunized from prosecution or accountability for COVID casualties thanks to their ruling class partners within the political sphere. And a mere handful of individuals, with unprecedented amounts of wealth numbering in the billions of dollars, have made out like bandits over the course of the pandemic, literally profiting off a system designed to exploit and capitalize on mass suffering and privation.<\/p>\n

Thus, when we ask the question, what is disability, we are not really providing a full answer if we only talk about physiology, biology, or even identity reduced to a cataloging of manifest limitations or functional deficits. In fact, disability \u2013 or, to put it perhaps more accurately, disablement \u2013 is a dialectical phenomenon arising from existing political, economic, and social relations in society.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the question of disability is really a question of disability oppression.<\/p>\n

If for no other reason, this observation is born out simply by the fact that a person with a given impairment or morphological variation will find themselves either more or less marginalized or accommodated to varying degrees according to the type of society in which they live. That is, disability is inextricably embedded in and intelligible through the broader socioeconomic context.<\/p>\n

Capitalism and the origins of disability<\/h4>\n

Coming from radical, socialist, and Marxist traditions, a number of disability scholars and activists have argued that the modern phenomenon of disability historically emerged from, and alongside, the advent of capitalist market, labor, and commodity relations. 1

The notion that a group of people \u2013 with a vast array of completely different traits, capacities, morphologies, and phenotypes \u2013 could be lumped together and labeled according to their relative lack of generalized \u201cability,\u201d in the abstract, is in fact endemic to the particular period of more recent human history signaled by the emergence and dominance of the capitalist mode.<\/p>\n

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  1. The generally socialized character of economic production and distribution, which had prevailed throughout most of human history, had to be disrupted and sundered. The indigenous networks and tribal villages of pre-class society, as well as the communal peasant lands and agrarian harvests of feudal and tributary society, were by degrees atomized, usurped, capitalized, and ultimately revolutionized or abolished.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. This trend led to the vast dispossession and alienation of masses of peoples from lands and resources. The broad mass of the populace, divorced from the means of procuring a subsistence according to the conditions prevailing hitherto, now found themselves compelled to earn a living by selling their individual capacity to perform labor in an increasingly mechanized, fast-pace, arduous, and frankly exploitative mode of production. The emergence of the mass commodities market and the emergence of the so-called \u201clabor market\u201d go hand in hand, mutually predicated upon the other. The reduction of essential human value to the relative worth or price that their labor power can fetch on the market.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The dialectics of capitalism and disability<\/h4>\n

      \u201cIndustrial capitalism,\u201d wrote the late disability scholar and activist Marta Russell,<\/p>\n

      created both a class of proletarians and a class of disabled who did not conform to the standard worker body and whose labor power was effectively ignored. A market-driven society meant that disabled persons perceived to be of less use to the competitive profit cycle were excluded from work. As a result, disabled persons came to be regarded as a social problem, and the justification emerged for segregating individuals with impairments from mainstream life and into a variety of institutions including workhouses, asylums, prisons, colonies, and special schools.2

      Russell\u2019s insight here aptly captures what is in effect the dual character of disability as both an economic and a social phenomenon. On the one hand, disability is a primary, autonomic function of the operation of the capitalist system of production, exchange, and accumulation of wealth. In other words, the process whereby workers with various impairments are rendered less valuable \u2013 or of no value at all \u2013 to the economy is, within the context of capitalist imperatives, an intrinsic phenomenon.<\/p>\n